Seeing in the Dark

Watch any movie or TV show that takes place before electricity, and you’re likely to see candles everywhere. Is it dark outside? No problem—we’ve got candles, so let’s just light a few of them up and then it’ll just be as bright as day!

Well, no. Your own power has gone out, so you know what’s typically depicted in films can’t quite be right.

When kerosene came around, the economic proposition changed, as I described in Leftovers:

If you had kerosene, you could suddenly see at night. If you didn’t, you had to deal with the next best thing, and it wasn’t great.

Seriously, have you ever tried reading by candlelight? How about by burning whale fat?

Prior to kerosene, if you needed to walk around your house, there wasn’t much alternative to carrying a candle around. But what if you wanted to read?

It was difficult to read by candlelight when it was pitch black outside, but it wasn’t impossible. A few things could make it more manageable. For one thing, people set up rooms designed to make every piece of light count. Little mirrors could help the light of a candle’s flame stay within a little reading nook.

They had to do what they could to preserve the candle’s luminous output. For about a meter in any direction, the light shone at one lux, a unit used for this specific type of measurement. By contrast, a typical living room lights up to about 200 lux, give or take.

Also: I mentioned making your house bright as day with candles, but bright days are more like tens of thousands of lux. Nobody’s house was going to be as bright as day, unless it was day.

Prior to that takeover of kerosene from the 1800s, candles had been the dominant thing for a very, very long time.

If you think about what a candle is, you really just need something to light on fire and something else to make sure that burn happens slowly, and at a controlled pace. Go back 5000 years, to the origins of written language and the wheel, and you’ll find Ancient Egyptian inventions similar to candles. They took reeds and soaked them in melted animal fat, producing a slow but unsteady source of light.

By the time of Ancient Rome, there were truly wicked candles—papyrus was rolled and dipped in beeswax or animal fat. Meanwhile, oil lamps were used in tandem with candles, but candles were the ultimate grab-and-go light source.

Ever notice how movies show one or two candles lighting up an entire house? What’s your go-to light source when the power goes out nowadays?